This week, the US Environmental Protection Agency released its final report on the potential impacts of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water resources. One notable change from an earlier version, released in 2015, is the agency’s exclusion of the line “We did not find evidence [of] widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.” The omission has garnered much attention, with some claiming that its absence indicates that fracking does result in systemic contamination of drinking water, while others point to the lack of empirical data as evidence that fracking does not result in contamination.
However, as RFF’s Isabel Echarte, Alan J. Krupnick, and Daniel Raimi write in a recent blog post, even without that language, the substantive evidence and underlying research in the final report have actually changed very little from the earlier draft. They emphasize that “EPA found that its draft language had not clearly communicated the findings of the report, noting that the executive summary led various stakeholder groups to interpret its conclusions in different ways. Unfortunately, the change in report language will do nothing to help resolve the uncertainties about the systemic nature of the problems. This can only be done with more research. In fact, industry and EPA have discussed exploring these risks through a series of pre- and post-monitoring field experiments, but the parties could not come to an agreement to carry out the work. Until research like this is conducted, heat—rather than light—will continue to characterize the debate.”
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The views expressed in RFF blog posts are those of the authors and should not be attributed to Resources for the Future.
